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Talk about stressful. We went from day one everything was fine, learned about how beavers build the dam, calm, cool, collected Jonathan’s making this waterwheel no problem. Day two, dam is built, my hands were freezing, it’s absolutely glacial water. Never been in so much pain but yet so happy because things are working. We needed a still reservoir so the suction in the tube would work, beautiful. It goes spraying out on the other end, right back into the water, after turning the waterwheel. Very happy.

But then day three, this is just totally rough science, everything is going well and then, you know, a half an hour before we’re supposed to test it everything goes pear shaped. Lost pressure in the tube for no apparent reason, had to re-string, pull up the tube, cut off the tube hoping to find the blockage. It had to either be a blockage or an air lock or something but that’s the time, you know, you can’t, you’ve got to problem solve, you can’t figure out exactly what’s wrong, with a half an hour to go you’ve just go to do it. So we cut off the top of the tube, made sure there was no kinks in it, redid the suction and when everything was turned on we got electricity. I don’t know what happened but it felt great.

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Originally published: Tuesday, 1st November 2005

Last updated on: Wednesday, 2nd November 2005

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Body text - Copyright: The Open University

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